The end of globalization

The tariff wars or the globalization crisis shows no signs of abating. It looks like the end of globalization or the cutting of barriers to exports and imports across borders is a done deal.

The enormous loss of trust among countries trading with each other will take a long time to restore, if at all. And one valuable lesson every country must learn from the end of globalization is – self-reliance. The three-year Russia-Ukraine war, in fact, should have implanted the doctrine of self-reliance among leaders and policymakers.

To survive in the coming years, a country must increasingly rely on its own people, its own resources and on its own resilience.

In this regard, the Philippines is well positioned among the ten-member countries of the ASEAN to beat the tariff game.

The country has vast resources – 120 million people, rich natural resources that can feed more than 300 million and strategic location for which the world powers are fighting to control.

When Lapulapu defeated the fleet of Ferdinand Magellan in 1521, the seeds of resilience were planted in the Filipino psyche. Magellan, after all, represented Spain, in the 16th century the world’s greatest naval power. Yet, Lapulapu defeated it, in less than a day, with just 1,000 men, using nothing more modern than bows, arrows, bolos, knives, true grit and raw courage.

Thanks to Donald J. Trump, self-reliance is now being embraced by the European Union and by the more than 30 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

President Trump has claimed the United States spent up to $300 billion defending Ukraine. He has finally gotten tired of bankrolling a seemingly endless war that to him has little or no strategic value.

Official figures of US spending on the Ukraine war could be lower – $182.8 billion by the US Department of Defense, $119.7 billion by the Kiel Institute, per BBC. Still, that’s a lot of money for an administration that is trying to fire up to 200,000 federal employees and trim up to $2 trillion in federal spending.

The Trump gambit on NATO is working. On April 4, 2025, NATO members approved 20 billion euros in additional spending for Ukraine’s defense – to deter Russian aggression which NATO claims has the support of China, North Korea and Iran. The US and NATO countries have determined that their common enemy is CRINK – China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. “We will defend ourselves should anyone make the mistake of attacking,” declared NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte on April 4, following the meeting of the NATO foreign affairs ministers to mark the military alliance’s 76th anniversary.

In the meantime, Trump has launched his own kind of war – a tariff war, a trade war. Like any global war, it is a war in which everybody suffers, with the pain deep and lasting, and the damage horrendous and irredeemable.

The free trade system was set up under the World Trade Organization in 1995. WTO cut tariff and other trade barriers, settled trading disputes, increased competitiveness and thus lowered prices and contributed enormously to global peace, accountability and prosperity. In its first 75 years of GATT (WTO’s predecessor) and WTO, global exports grew six percent per year, trade grew 1.5 times more than the global economic growth annually and, by 2023, global exports were 250 times the level in 1948.

Free trade made many nations rich – China, the US, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, to name some. The Philippines did not prosper as marvelously as these countries because it did not really produce any manufactured goods of great consumer need or strategic value. Except humans.

The Philippines produces two million humans every year, making our population one of the fastest growing in the world, at a 1.8 percent annual clip. It used to be five percent. As a result, we have been able to export 12 million humans to some 120 countries.

Those humans remit to the country $42 billion a year – money that is 100 percent value added, because the government did not need to provide tax incentives, cheap land and ease of doing business promises as it does to foreign investors here.

Despite earning $42 billion for the Philippines every year, those humans are grossly underpriced for their brain, talent and labor. Apple makes and exports one billion iPhones and hauls in $100 billion in profits every year; its revenues from iPhones were $69 billion in the first quarter of 2025 alone.

What is an iPhone compared to a Filipino human? Filipino nurses take care of the British royalty. Filipinos practically run Doha’s Hamad International Airport, said to be the world’s best airport. They take care of the children of Saudi princes and other royalties of the world.

Because of our OFWs, the Philippines easily recovered from a COVID-induced recession, the worst since 1947, during the Duterte presidency. Economic growth collapsed, from an average of 6.3 percent growth in 10 years before COVID, to a drop of more than 9.50 percent negative growth in 2020, but thanks to steady remittances, the economy recovered to its current clip of more than six percent per year.

One of the biggest benefits Rodrigo Duterte gave our OFWs was his order to the Bureau of Customs not to mess with the baggage and cargo of returning Filipinos. “Challenge them, shame them,” was Duterte’s advice to returning Filipinos if their balikbayan boxes and other luggage were pried open by salivating customs personnel.

Today, that benefit is gone. Our Customs are back to their old racket of harassing returning Filipinos, opening up their luggage willy-nilly (sometimes they just destroy it), extorting from the poor traveler. And tanim bala is back.

Cannot President BBM return the old Duterte courtesy to returning Filipino travelers?

*      *      *

Email: biznewsasia@gmail.com